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Continuing on the quest to be more nimble and streamlined, we’ve split Wi-Fi, WWAN, Bluetooth, ADSL, and WiMAX device support into plugins which you don’t need to install if you like a minimal system. Distributions should package these separately so they can be added/removed independently of NetworkManager itself, which reduces disk usage, runtime memory usage, and packaging dependency chains. We’ve also spent time slimming down and optimizing the code. The core NetworkManager daemon is now just over 1MB in size!

dbus-daemon is also no longer required for root-only or early-boot operation, with communication using a private root-only Unix socket. Similarly, PolicyKit is no longer used for root operation, though it could always be disabled at build-time anyway.

Cool, so it could replace systemd-networkd.

The NetworkManager dispatcher got some enhancements too. It now has a “pre-up” event that allow scripts to execute before NetworkManager announces connectivity to applications. We also added a “pre-down” event that lets network filesystems flush data before the interface is actually disconnected from the network.

That would be really nice for my ipsec dispatcher script. No more races.

We’ve also upped our game with IP-level configuration support for many more software interfaces like GRE, macvlan, macvtap, tun, tap, veth, and vxlan.

This could mean trouble, but wait...

Do you love /sbin/ip? ifconfig? brctl? vconfig? Keep using them! Changes you make outside of NetworkManager get picked up, respected, and reflected in the D-Bus API. NetworkManager 0.9.10 also goes to great lengths to read the existing configuration of interfaces and not touch them. Most network interfaces known to the kernel are now exposed in the D-Bus API, and you can even change their IP configuration right from NetworkManager. There’s more work to do here but we hope you’ll appreciate the new situational awareness as much as we do.

I think this is going to be the best NetworkManager for power users yet.

I think this is going to be the best NetworkManager for power users yet.

I think systemd-networkd is intended as a more lightweight alternative for simpler use-cases.

That said, the release notes look very promising. I think a good CLI was the big thing missing... I've always been a fan of uniformity when it comes to configuration interfaces, and while (practically) requiring a GUI is unacceptable, having separate tools for every different kind of network interface or tunnel type is suboptimal (the "ip" tool alone is pretty good, but then you have brctl, vconfig, ifconfig (deprecated) and who knows what other tools with completely different UI paradigms.)

Having consistent, uniform interfaces means there's less to remember, thus making it possible to focus on knowledge in depth and fewer irrelevant new things to learn when you must work with something unfamiliar. If NetworkManager can consolidate the interfaces for, well, network management, behind sane CLI/GUI/dbus interfaces, they have my full support.